Only 18 incompetent teachers sacked in 40 years

[longfingernails]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10464617.stm

That is totally unacceptable. We have been putting teachers before children for too long when it comes to teaching standards. Simultaneously we have been putting the "rights" of children ahead of the teachers' ability to maintain discipline.

Thankfully academies and free schools will break the stranglehold of the teaching unions and local education authorities, and introduce real competition and accountability into the state school system.

By comparison, in big private sector companies it is fairly standard practice to eliminate at least the bottom-performing 5% of staff every year.

I would like to know how many teachers put onto competency leave teaching 'of their own accord', i.e. jump before being pushed. It's happened where I work several times.

I agree the figure of 18 in 40 years is totally outrageous and shall be watching Panorama with interest.

I agree that if teachers are not up to the job they should not stay. As a teacher though schools are very different and schools have a responsibility to hire staff that suit the profile of the school. I was a good teacher with in a tough low achieving comp. I am now in a higher achieving comp and am outstanding . I took time to reflect on what my strengths and weaknesses are and sought a job accordingly. In my present school I see teachers struggling to keep up but I think they would be fab in a tough comp. I have worked in the state system with teachers who were totally inneffective but they left to teach in a public boarding school and are now doing an amazing job.

So yes I agree that our children deserve teachers who are up to the job but before we sack hordes of teachers we should perhaps think do they need to be somewhere else rather than out of the profession.

While I agree that teachers should not stay when they cannot do the job it is hard not to feel some pity for those teachers who go from lesson to lesson being ripped to shreds. It is a heart attack waiting to happen, for their own sake they should move on.

I am all for reducing the stranglehold of the progressives on education policy, but I think that this is a witchhunt against imdividual teachers. Teachers who are not up to the job should receive help and extra training to improve their performance. It would be a huge waste of money to sack 15000 teachers who have been through the expense of the qualification process. They can be helped and turned around just as underperforming employees in any other business can. If 15000 teachers are so bad, then tighten up the qualification process so that they are identified at an earlier stage, then give them extra guidance and help to improve. By all means let's free up schools, but let's not have a witchhunt against struggling teachers, let's have a witchhunt against the real problem, the progressives at the top who have destroyed standards and allowed the progressive dumbing down.

claig

15000 out of 500000 isn't a surprising number - I suspect the number of teachers who just aren't cut out for it is much higher.

Obviously there should be retraining schemes and help for bad teachers to improve. But often that won't be nearly enough.

18 sackings in 40 years is just an unbelievably low number.

How many childrens' futures have been sacrified by keeping bad teachers in place?

yes but how many childrens' futures and the country's future have been sacrificed by allowing the progressives at the top to remain in place? They are the ones who have caused the real harm. I am sure that really struggling teachers would leave the profession of their own accord because the stress would be too great. The rest can be helped, they should be identified and mentored and given extra training. Why have they just now suddenly discovered after 40 years that only 18 teachers have been sacked over 40 years? This is clearly a witchhunt against teachers and they want the public on side as they begin cutting teachers and education.

I agree about the tightening up the training, having trained lots of PGCE students I find that if you can stand in front of a class without crying and can get them to listen to something vaguely related to the topic you are "teaching" for a short period of time you are classed as "good" and welcomed into the profession.

If you do all the above and they suspect you know what you are talking about you are "outstanding"

agree that is the problem, the decline in standards from the top down. It's not the individual teachers' fault, it's the training regimes they have been through that allowed them to be where they are. The politicians have known for years that many of the teachers had low levels of mathematical ability for example, yet they did little about it. Now, when they want to make cuts, they have suddenly found all of the poor teachers.

I genuinely do not understand where all the good teachers have gone, I have not met a single PGCE student, in my own subject area, that I would wish to work with since returning to teaching after a break to have my daughter (about six years)

Actually no there was one and he decided at the last minute to do something else!)

I don't even think it is about mathematical ability, we have had very few who have relevant degrees. Not one has been passionate, living and breathing the job. Qute frankly if you start off being ambivalent how is it going to be five years down the line. No independent planning, no real presence and control in the classroom, no real subject knowledge. It makes me want to weep.

Hmm. I think it's true that most incompetent teachers would leave before they were sacked. I have worked with someone who was sacked for gross misconduct, but that wasn;t about teaching competency.

There is certainly a huge pressure to pass students and NQTs in my subject (Science) because there just aren't enough. Or at least, there aren't enough willing to work in my school (challenging!).

I think our competency is fairly well monitored actually. Much more so than when I first started as a teacher. I passed ym PGCE and that was it. No NQT year, no competency profiles or anything like that. You taught, you moved up the pay scales and that was that. Occassionally you got OFTEDed. Now people are in and out of my lessons all the time. We have performance management where we have to account for each individual underachieving student we teach. It's much more rigorous.

You can't sack staff for any reason if you need them more than they need you. For much if the last 40 years pay and status for teachers was so low that you didn't want to pass up a warm body regardless if their teaching ability.

I agree that you are watched all the time, but say that you are watched and found to be crap - it takes an awful long time to do something about it. I say that and I work in a quite trigger happy school in terms of pupils and staff.

yes the standards have been too low. The people making policy didn't care, they knew what was going on. All they wanted to do was turn up at the dispatch box and quote Alice in Wonderland figures about what a great education system we had, so that they could justify where all the money went.

That is what I don't get The Coalition, a cursory read just on here betrays the fact that people think teachers have an easy life. If that is the perception why are there not a higher number of quality applicants?

I don't think that sacking 5%-10% of the lowest performers is that common in the private sector either. Where it is used it is in areas where productivity can be measured easily and reasonably accurately and there is a steady supply of people wanting to replace them. So more common in relatively high profile occupations like law and finance, less so in support services etc.

Whatever happened to that disgusting Labour policy where they were going to give teachers a 5 year licence? You can just imagine them reviewing a teacher's performance and saying you are not up to it, so you're out. That's no way to treat people who have invested a lot in their career.
www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/teachers-face-the-sack-in-5year-licence-plan-172 6193.html

I'd like to see the bigwigs at the top on 1 year licences, so that they could be held to account, not teachers at the coalface.

Soon they'll start on nurses, telling us that many of those are also incompetent.

Daisymiller - I think applications HAVE gone up as pay and conditions have improved. Lots of people, particularly when they are young, don't especially WANT an easy life, they would rather try for more money.
And peoples perception of it as an easy life changes when they think about trying to.actually reach a load of teenagers....

If applications have gone up why am I only seeing the dross? Is it that more people are applying but the wrong ones?

I would have no problem with a 5 year licence.

did the licence plan become law in the end? I'm amazed that teaching unions would lie down for that.

"the bottom-performing 5% of staff every year."

In what sense 'bottom-performing"? In terms of grade, VA, emotional literacy? A good grade enabling teacher might be appalling in their dealings with children - ie teach by fear or by rote, not by inspiration or enthusiasm. Does it not depend what we want from our schools? DH's pupils rarely get a single GCSE - he works in a special school - but there is no way a single pupil or fellow teacher would say he was a poor teacher.

I think the decline in the standard of students conincided with the introduction of them having to pay tuition fees. The university which gave me my degree used to be very rigorous - turning up without a lesson plan was pretty much a hanging offence which would see you kicked off the course.

Now the same university accepted one of our student's weak excuses of 'I left my file at home' time and time again, even when she was found typing one of them up straight after a tutor observation for said lesson. But she is now a paying customer, and they need her money. She ended up with a 'good', but decided to leave teaching before the end of her degree, thank god.

Well, my SLT also v trigger happy wrt bad teachers. It doesn't take long to do something. And some teachers do not stay long at the school. However, they don't get sacked. Which is where the OP is coming from I suppose.

We seem to enable the majority to "move on" and from what I hear it is not a nice process but every school has at least two or three teachers that everyone knows ius crap and yet they stay.